GaAs HBT Reliability

Author

Yeats, B. ; Low, T.S. ; Alt, K. ; Adamski, M.E. ; Bonse, M. ; Avanzo, D. C D ; Dvorak, M. ; Hutchinson, C.P. ; Iwamoto, M. ; Kellert, F.G. ; Kuhn, D.K. ; Shimon, R.L. ; Shirley, T.E.

Author_Institution

Agilent Technol., Santa Rosa, CA

fYear

2008

fDate

12-15 Oct. 2008

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

We discuss the many factors affecting the reliability of GaAs HBTs that we have encountered starting from the early days of AlGaAs-emitter HBTs through the present day use of InGaP-emitter HBTs. We discuss both wearout and infancy failure modes and try to distinguish fundamental (i.e., unavoidable) from nonfundamental failure modes. We have found that infant failures are dominated by substrate dislocation density, which can limit long-term-reliable circuit sizes to under ~1000 transistors.

Keywords

III-V semiconductors; aluminium compounds; failure analysis; gallium arsenide; gallium compounds; heterojunction bipolar transistors; indium compounds; semiconductor device reliability; AlGaAs-GaAs; GaAs; HBT reliability; InGaP-GaAs; fundamental failure modes; infancy failure modes; long-term-reliable circuit; nonfundamental failure modes; wearout failure modes; Acceleration; Circuits; Failure analysis; Gallium arsenide; Heterojunction bipolar transistors; Instruments; Material properties; Materials reliability; Passivation; Temperature;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Compound Semiconductor Integrated Circuits Symposium, 2008. CSIC '08. IEEE

Conference_Location

Monterey, CA

ISSN

1550-8781

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-1939-5

Electronic_ISBN

1550-8781

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CSICS.2008.14

Filename

4674469